This page contains the most commonly asked
questions handled by our technical support staff. Chances are,
your question has already been answered. If you can't find the
answer to your question here, please send mail to support@martnet.com.
All relevent questions will be answered and added to this FAQ.

This is a very interesting question, because
with your MartNet Hosted Domain, your email address is "anything-you-want@yourdomain.com". When you set up your account, you chose
a username for the Administrative Account for the Domain.
This account is where your Web Site lives, and it is your default
Mail Box for the Domain. Any mail going to anything-you-want@yourdomain.com will automatically go to the mailbox of the administrative
account for that domain. We can over ride this by setting up additional
Aliases that point to a different mail box, if necessary.
So basically, this gives you the ability to have an unlimited
range of e-mail addresses for administrative or marketing purposes,
with no additional hassle or cost of actually setting them up!
It is no longer necessary to add aliases or create seperate accounts
to have different e-mail addresses in your domain that point to
one real mailbox!

For example, the following popular addresses
will all work, and drop the mail in your Administrative Account
mailbox, by default:

webmaster@yourdomain.com

a-really-long-name@yourdomain.com

admin@yourdomain.com

sales@yourdomain.com

info@yourdomain.com

The possibilities are endless! You are no
longer limited to 8 charachter names in your E-mail addresses.
Mail addresses that are mistyped will still reach you, provided
@yourdomain.com is correct.

We can also set up Aliases to route mail
to any Internet mail account (not just accounts on our
systems.) For example, say you want mail to sales@yourdomain.com
to go straight to your Sales manager, who has a Compuserv address
they've been using for years. We simply set up an alias to redirect
all mail for sales@yourdomain.com to the Compuserv address (we
charge a one time fee of $4.95 for setting up a mail alias. We
will set up aliases free of charge if requested when setting up
a new mail account at MartNet!)

Our Internet Mail system is extremely versitile,
and we can configure it to meet almost any mail routing need for
your MartNet Hosted Virtual Domain!

What's the difference between an
E-Mail Address and a Mail Box or Mail Account?

An E-Mail address is what a person types
into a mail program to send you mail, ie: username@yourdomain.com.
A Mail Box is where the mail is delivered, and where you will
direct your Mail Reader to check and read your mail. In the early
days of the Internet, there was no difference between the two.
With a MartNet Hosted Virtual Domain, there is a difference! You
have a virtually unlimited number of E-mail addresses (see above)
and mail sent to those addresses goes to your Mail Box
(or mail account - the terms are interchangable.) You enter your
Mail Account name (the same as your username) and password in
your mail reader when checking and reading your mail. By default,
you have one Mail Box with your MartNet Hosted Virtual Domain
(with a 10MB quota for all files) and we can easily set up additional
mail boxes (each with their own 10MB quota) to create a custom
mail system that can satisfy all Internet Mail needs. For example,
a 10 person company can get a MartNet Hosted Virtual Domain with
10 private mailboxes, one for each person. Each person can use
a modem or local area network connection to check their private
mailbox.

How do I send mail from "mydomain.com"
using Netscape, MS Outlook, Eudora, or any other POP3 mail reader?

The process of configuring your mail reader
varies from program to program (and even amongst different versions
of the same program, most notably Outlook 96, 97, and 98.) For
specific instructions on how to configure your Mail program, please
refer to the help files or printed documentation that came with
your Mail program. We have also written
basic instructions for configuring some of the most popular Mail
Programs. They are available Here.

Once you have found the configuration window for
your mail program, you will need to use the following settings,
where applicable:

POP Account:

username@yourdomain.com

Real Name:

Your Name

Return Address:

whatever-you-want@yourdomain.com

SMTP Server:

postoffice.yourdomain.com

POP Server:

postoffice.yourdomain.com

How do I send mail from "mydomain.com"
using elm, pine, or another mail reader available in my shell
account?

A working knowledge of using your Unix Shell
Account is assumed here. If you don't know what pine, elm, a Shell,
or Pico are, you may want to check our our Shell
Account Support section of this site.

Elm does not support user-configured "From"
lines. You should use pine to send mail if you want to
use the mail features of your MartNet Virtually Hosted Domain
account.

The above address has 2 parts to it: The
username (webmaster) and the Domain Name (@mydomain.com.
) The user name can not be changed. (This is a security
feature to help ensure the integrity and authenticity of mail
sent from our systems.) If you want to change the user name (ie.:
to "webmaster") you can use a properly configured
POP3 mail program to do so.

You can change the Domain Name so
that the message appears to come from your MartNet Virtually Hosted
Domain account. (Note: it is against our usage policy to send
mail from a Domain you do not own or have authorization to use.
We will lock and delete accounts of people who abuse other's private
Domain Names.)

Just edit your .pinerc file (run pine first
to create it and set up it's folders, then type "pico .pinerc" from your "www1:~$"prompt)
and look for the following lines in your ~/.pinerc file:

To change the Domain Name (ie.: to
"mydomain.com"):

# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail.
user-domain=

Just type your domain name in, so the line
reads:

# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail.user-domain="mydomain.com"

Only Valid Domain Names hosted at MartNet
will work. Domain Names are NOT case sensitive, so mydomain.com
is the same as MyDomain.com. If you type an invalid domain
name here then you will receive an error when sending mail, and
the mail will not be sent, so be sure to send yourself a test
message after setting up the "user-domain" in your .pinerc
file!

Also remember that if you do set a "user-domain,"
you will need to type the full e-mail address when sending mail
to any MartNet mail address (ie.: support@martnet.com)

You can change
the name that appears with the message (this is seperate from
the username that is part of the return address.)

To change the Name (ie.: to "webmaster")

# Over-rides your full name from Unix password file. Required for PC-Pine.
personal-name=

Just type your user name or alias in, so
the line reads:

# Over-rides your full name from Unix password file. Required for PC-Pine.personal-name="webmaster"

OK.
So I followed the above instructions, but I still see "martnet.com"
all over the mail headers. What do the Mail Headers actually mean?

A basic explanation of
Mail Headers is in order here.While it is not necessary to understand mail headers
to send and receive Internet mail, it is nice to know what all
that info is, and which parts people will always see, so that
you can be sure you mail client is configured to do what you want
it to do...

Here's a sample header from a message generated
by Pine on merv.martnet.com:

Note that most mail readers hide the full
headers by default, but have an option to turn full headers on.
(most people don't have any need or desire to know the information
contained in the headers. If you do, you know who you are and
have probably figured out how to get your mail reader to diaplay
full headers already!) Full headers from messages sent across
the Internet contain even more information than what's above,
including mail routes through all servers between the source and
destination mail servers. These headers are designed to give full
information on mail routing and authenticity for Systems Administrators,
and thus can be quite confusing to the untrained eye! (we won't
attempt to cover them here. There are many excellent books and
web sites dedicated to the topic of Internet Mail routing and
administration.) Don't let this discourage you from learning more
about Internet Mail! A great deal of stuff has to happen to get
mail delivered between millions of Internet Hosts! You should
know that our systems are configured to offer the best mix of
flexibility and security to meet our customer's
Internet E-mail needs.

Here's a line by line breakdown of what
the headers do:

From The first of 2 "from" lines, it identifies
to mail servers, gateways, and readers where the message originated
from. This information is used to verify where mail came from.
Virtual Hosts that are authorized by the local mail server can
appear in this line.

X-Delivered: Contains the actual username (NOT an alias) and
Internet Mail Server Host Name (NOT a Virtual Host, CNAME or
alias) that the mail originated from. This information is also
used to verify where mail came from.

Date: The time and date the message was sent, in both
local system time (13:55:21) and GMT (Greenwich Meridian Time,
-0500) the International Time Standard which measures time relative
(+ or - X number of hours) from the Royal National Observatory
in Greenwich, England. The Royal National Observatory sits atop
the Prime Meridian, and for hundreds of years was the center
of Western Physics, Mathematics and Astronomic research. Most
modern mathematical concepts and standards were invented in or
around the observatoty (Newton invented Calculus there, and allegedly
discovered gravity while slacking under the Apple tree in the
front yard...) The Observatory is pretty much useless for doing
Astronomical research (it's on the edge of Central London, and
the lights from the city make it pretty hard to peer into the
night sky) so it's been converted into a World Class museum dedicated
to the founding principals of modern Mathematics, Astronomy,
and Physics. And there are a few good, cheap pubs at the bottom
of the hill, but we're getting off the topic here... Greenwich
Mean Time is used by all mail programs when sorting mail by
Date and Time sent, helping to keep geographic intracicies
from screwing up the Global Internet (otherwise, mail send from
someone on the East coast would appear to come from "the
future" to someone on the West coast.)

From: The second "from" line, this one is
what the recipient will actually see in their mail message, and
if they "respond" to the message, this is the address
the response is sent to. When dealing with sending mail from
your Virtual Hosts, this is the line you want to make sure is
accurate. The first part,Webmaster, is what people
will see in the "Name From" field in their mail reader.
The second part, , is the address
they will see and reply to.

X-Sender: the actual username and server that sent the mail.
This is the real server (determined by the local server configuration
or a Domain Name Lookup.) Used for a variaty of mail tracking
tasks.

To: The destination address; who you are sending the
mail to (it can be a full Internet E-mail address ie.: user@destination-domain.com"
or a mail address for delivery on the local machine, which would
simply be username.

Subject: The subject of the message. Pretty self explanitory.

Message-ID: Info used by sendmail and other mail routing programs
to que and track the message to it's final destination.